Mum was around most when I was a kid – I didn’t see much of Dad. He worked variously as a bus and ambulance driver, and a bread delivery man, and was out of the house before we got up. “Wait until your father gets home” was almost a catchphrase, but although you knew he would be enforcing discipline, you also knew it was Mum’s discipline he would be enforcing.
My family came from Wexford. Dad was three when he arrived in Liverpool. Mum, who worked as a school cleaner, was born in the city, but her parents moved over from Ireland. Mum and Dad met through the Irish Catholic church and were both given the Benemerenti medal by the Pope in recognition of their tireless voluntary work. That’s where I inherited my great belief in communities coming together and why I was happy to stand beside David Cameron when he launched the “big society” in Liverpool in 2010.
My sister, Kathy, is the eldest. I arrived three years later, in 1949, followed by my brother, Larry, three years after that. My sibling relationships were the same as those I’ve depicted in my programmes – at times fractious, but mostly supportive. We’ve remained close.
Dad served in the King’s Regiment (Liverpool), which helped form General Orde Wingate’s Chindits, a special force sent behind Japanese lines in Burma. He rarely talked about it. One legacy was his residual resentment towards anything German or Japanese. Mum also loathed the Germans because she’d lost friends during the bombing of Liverpool and was strafed by the Luftwaffe while running for shelter.
When I was 21, I gave up my job as a quantity surveyor to become a writer, and my father thought I was throwing it all away. But when I later bought a house in an affluent area of Liverpool off the back of my Grange Hill success, he told me, misty-eyed, that he’d once driven buses down that road, little dreaming one of his own would ever be able to afford to live there.
I met my wife, Alexis, in the early 1980s after hiring an accountancy firm to review my TV production company. She impressed me with a great mix of technical skill and common sense. I persuaded her to join the company, and before long she was chief executive. We took it slowly at first, but kept up the pretence of leading separate lives until my personal assistant finally said, “For goodness sake, why don’t you just come and go in the same car every day? Everyone knows!”
I don’t talk about my kids but having them changes your whole outlook and suddenly you put them before everything. I’ve been through all the teenage traumas and they are classified as adults now. But as I counsel all my younger friends, nothing changes – they just get more expensive.
Thankfully, my parents lived to see my success. When Brookside caused controversy, they were very supportive, although I had to take a bit of earache from Mum about making “a holy show of them”, and from Dad about the earache he was getting from Mum. I did have one auntie who went to her grave delighted to be able to tell people she had never watched it. There’s one in every family.
Dad died of a heart attack in his late 70s. When Mum passed away in her mid-80s, we found all these scrapbooks packed with cuttings charting my career. Mind you, she never lost her ability to put me in my place – particularly about the length of my hair. Mothers always have that knack, no matter how old you are.
• Highbridge by Phil Redmond is published by Century, £12.99
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